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"Son of Sam" Case: First Amendment Analysis and Legislative Implications

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Order Code 92-56 A CRS Report for Congress Received through the CRS Web The “Son of Sam” Case: First Amendment Analysis and Legislative Implications Updated February 27, 2002 -name redacted- Legislative Attorney American Law Division Congressional Research Service The Library of Congress The “Son of Sam” Case: First Amendment Analysis and Legislative Implications Summary In Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Members of the New York State Crime Victims Board, the United States Supreme Court held that New York State’s “Son of Sam” law was inconsistent with the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and press. The Son of Sam law, in the Court’s words, “requires that an accused or convicted criminal’s income from works describing his crime be deposited in an escrow account. These funds are then made available to the victims of the crime and the criminal’s other creditors.” “[T]he Federal Government and most of the States have enacted statutes with similar objectives.” This report examines the Supreme Court decision and then considers whether its rationale renders the federal law unconstitutional. Concluding that it likely does, we consider whether it would be possible to enact a constitutional Son of Sam statute. Finally, we take note of some state Son-of-Sam statutes that have been enacted since the Supreme Court decision. The Court struck down the New York statute apparently because it was both underinclusive in that it applied solely to income derived from the exercise of First Amendment rights, and overinclusive in that it could have applied to books such as Saint Augustine’s Confessions, the inclusion of which would not have advanced the government’s legitimate interest in depriving criminals of the profits of their crimes and using these funds to compensate victims. The federal Son of Sam statute would appear to be unconstitutional for the same reasons, and it remains extremely speculative whether it would be possible to devise a constitutional Son of Sam law. Contents The New York Statute ........................................ 1 The First Amendment ........................................ 2 The Supreme Court Decision ................................... 2 The Federal Statute .......................................... 4 A Constitutional Son of Sam Statute? ............................ 5 Underinclusiveness ....................................... 5 Overinclusiveness ........................................ 7 Developments since Simon & Schuster ............................ 9 Conclusion ................................................ 11 The “Son of Sam” Case: First Amendment Analysis and Legislative Implications In Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Members of the New York State Crime Victims Board, the United States Supreme Court held that New York State’s “Son of Sam” law was inconsistent with the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and press.1 The Son of Sam law, in the Court’s words, “requires that an accused or convicted criminal’s income from works describing his crime be deposited in an escrow account. These funds are then made available to the victims of the crime and the criminal’s other creditors.”2 “[T]he Federal Government and most of the States have enacted statutes with similar objectives.”3 This report examines the Supreme Court decision and then considers whether its rationale renders the federal law unconstitutional. Concluding that it likely does, we consider whether it would be possible to enact a constitutional Son of Sam statute.4 Finally, we take note of some state Son-of-Sam statutes that have been enacted since the Supreme Court decision. The New York Statute The New York statute that the Supreme Court struck down required that anyone who contracts to pay a person accused or convicted of a crime in New York for such person’s “reenactment of such crime,” by way of a movie, book, magazine article, tape recording, or the like, or for such person’s “thoughts, feelings, opinions or emotions regarding such crime,” shall pay over to the Crime Victims Board “any moneys which would otherwise, by terms of such contract, be owing to the person so accused or convicted or his representatives.” The Board was then required to deposit the money in an escrow account and pay it to any victims of the accused or convicted person’s crimes who file a claim within five years of the date the escrow account is established. Remaining funds in the account were to be paid to other creditors of the accused or convicted person. The statute defined “person convicted of a crime” to include “any person who has voluntarily and intelligently admitted the commission of a crime,” even if such person has never been accused or convicted of it. 1 502 U.S. 105 (1991). 2 Id. at 108, summarizing N.Y. Executive Law § 632-a. 3 Id. at 115. The federal statute is codified at 18 U.S.C. § 3681. The state statutes in force at the time are listed in Note, Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Fischetti: Can New York’s Son of Sam Law Survive First Amendment Challenge?, 66 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1075, 1075 n.6 (1991) (Fischetti was the lower-court version of the Supreme Court case). 4 “Son of Sam” was the nickname of David Berkowitz, a serial killer whose 1977 crimes gave rise to the New York statute in question. CRS-2 The First Amendment The First Amendment to the Constitution provides, in pertinent part, that “Congress shall make no law . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” and it equally limits the states.5 Any law that limits speech on the basis of its content, including a law that imposes a financial burden on speakers because of the content of their speech, is presumptively unconstitutional.6 To overcome this presumption of unconstitutionality, “the State must show that its regulation is necessary to serve a compelling state interest and is narrowly drawn to achieve that end.”7 Thus, a state’s compelling interest in maintaining public safety might allow it to prohibit “falsely shouting fire in a theatre” – if it did not at the same time restrict speech in a manner beyond what was necessary to maintain public safety.8 The Supreme Court Decision The Supreme Court found that the New York statute served two compelling interests: “ensuring that victims of crime are compensated by those who harm them,” and “ensuring that criminals do not profit from their crimes.”9 The Court found that the state, however, had no compelling interest in “ensuring that criminals do not profit from storytelling about their crimes. The [New York State Crime Victims] Board cannot explain why the State should have any greater interest in compensating victims from the proceeds of such ‘storytelling’ than from any of the criminal’s other assets.”10 “In short,” Justice O’Connor wrote for the Court, “the State has a compelling interest in compensating victims from the fruits of the crime, but little if any interest in limiting such compensation to the proceeds of the wrongdoer’s speech about the crime. We must therefore determine whether the Son of Sam law is narrowly tailored to advance the former, not the latter, objective.11 The Court in this last sentence seems to be asking whether the statute is underinclusive, in that it applies only to speech. It might appear that the Court had already answered the question in its previous sentence when it said that “the State has . little if any interest in limiting such compensation to the proceeds of the wrongdoer’s speech about the crime.” But the Court did not think it had, as it said 5 Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925). 6 See, Simon & Schuster, supra note 1, at 115. 7 Id. at 118. The Court has indicated that, in the case of a content-based restriction on speech, such as that imposed by New York’s Son of Sam statute, “narrowly drawn” means that the regulation must constitute “the least restrictive means to further the articulated interest.” Sable Communications of California, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission, 492 U.S. 115, 126 (1989). 8 The quotation is from Justice Holmes’ opinion for the Court in Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47, 52 (1919). 9 Simon & Schuster, supra note 1, at 118, 119. 10 Id. at 119. 11 Id. at 120-121 CRS-3 elsewhere in the opinion that it “need not decide whether . the Son of Sam law is underinclusive. .”12 In any case, the Court at this point begins to address not whether the statute is underinclusive, in applying only to speech, but whether the statute is overinclusive, in applying to too much speech – i.e., in applying to speech to which it need not apply in order to advance its compelling interests. It concludes that it is. Here are three comments it makes on this subject: As a mean of ensuring that victims are compensated from the proceeds of crime, the Son of Sam law is significantly overinclusive. [T]he statute applies to works on any subject, provided that they express the author’s thoughts or recollections about his crime, however tangentially or incidentally. In addition, the statute’s broad definition of a “person convicted of a crime” enables the Board to escrow the income of any author who admits in his work to having committed a crime, whether or not the author was ever actually accused or convicted.13 Had the Son of Sam law been in effect at the time and place of publication, it would have escrowed payment for such works as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which describes crimes committed by the civil rights leader before he became a public figure; Civil Disobedience, in which Thoreau acknowledges his refusal to pay taxes and recalls his experience in jail; and even the Confessions of Saint Augustine, in which the author laments “my past foulness and the carnal corruptions of my soul,” one instance of which involved the theft of pears from a neighboring vineyard.14 Should a prominent figure write his autobiography at the end of his career, and include in an early chapter a brief recollection of having stolen (in New York) a nearly worthless item as a youthful prank, the Board would control his entire income from the book for five years, and would make that income available to all of the author’s creditors, despite the fact that the statute of limitations for this minor incident had long since run.
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